Loot
He
A short story by Nadine Gordimer
Once upon our time, there was an earthquake: but this one is the most powerful
ever recorded since the invention of the Richter scale made possible for us to
measure apocalyptic warnings.
It tipped a continental shelf. These tremblings often cause floods; this colossus did
the reverse, drew back the ocean as a vast breath taken. The most secret level of
our world lay revealed: the sea-bedded - wrecked ships, facades of houses,
ballroom candelabra, toilet bowl, pirate chest, TV screen, mail-coach, aircraft
fuselage, canon, marble torso, Kalashnikov, metal carapace of a tourist bus-load,
baptismal font, automatic dishwasher, computer, swords sheathed in barnacles,
coins turned to stone. The astounded gaze raced among these things; the
population who had fled from their toppling houses to the maritime hills, ran
down. Where terrestrial crash and bellow had terrified them, there was naked
silence. The saliva of the sea glistened upon these objects; it is given that time
does not, never did, exist down there where the materiality of the past and the
present as they lie has no chronological order, all is one, all is nothing - or all is
possessible at once.
People rushed to take; take, take. This was - when, anytime, sometime - valuable,
that might be useful, what was this, well someone will know, that must have
belonged to the rich, it's mine now, if you don't grab what's over there someone
else will, feet slipped and slithered on seaweed and sank in soggy sand, gasping
sea-plants gaped at them, no-one remarked there were no fish, the living
inhabitants of this unearth had been swept up and away with the water. The
ordinary opportunity of looting shops which was routine to people during the
political uprisings was no comparison. Orgiastic joy gave men, women and their
children strength to heave out of the slime and sand what they did not know they
wanted, quickened their staggering gait as they ranged, and this was more than
profiting by happenstance, it was robbing the power of nature before which they
had fled helpless. Take, take; while grabbing they were able to forget the wreck of
their houses and the loss of time-bound possessions there. They had tattered the
silence with their shouts to one another and under these cries like the cries of the
absent seagulls they did not hear a distant approach of sound rising as a great wind
does. And then the sea came back, engulfed them to add to its treasury.
That is what is known; in television coverage that really had nothing to show but
the pewter skin of the depths, in radio interviews with those few infirm, timid or
prudent who had not come down from the hills, and in newspaper accounts of
bodies that for some reason the sea rejected, washed up down the coast
somewhere.
But the writer knows something no-one else knows; the sea-change of the
imagination.
Now listen, there's a man who has wanted a certain object (what) all his life.
has a lot of - things - some of which his eye falls upon often, so he must be fond
of, some of which he doesn't notice, deliberately, that he probably shouldn't have
acquired but cannot cast off, there's an art noveau lamp he reads by, and above his
bed-head a Japanese print, a Hokusai, 'The Great Wave', he doesn't really collect
oriental stuff, although if it had been on the wall facing him it might have been
more than part of the furnishings, it's been out of sight behind his head for years.
All these - things - but not the one.
He's a retired man, long divorced, chosen an old but well-appointed villa in the
maritime hills as the site from which to turn his back on the assault of the city. A
woman from the village cooks and cleans and doesn't bother him with any other
communication. It is a life blessedly freed of excitement, he's had enough of that
kind of disturbance, pleasurable or not, but the sight from his lookout of what
could never have happened, never ever have been vouchsafed, is a kind of
command. He is one of those who are racing out over the glistening sea-bed, the
past - detritus-treasure, one and the same - stripped bare.
Like all the other looters with whom he doesn't mix, has nothing in common, he
races from object to object, turning over the shards of painted china, the sculptures
created by destruction, abandonment and rust, the brine-vintaged wine casks, a
plunged racing motorcycle, a dentist's chair, his stride landing on disintegrated
human ribs and mettarsals he does not identify. But unlike the others, he takes
nothing - until: there, ornate with tresses of orange-brown seaweed, stuck-fast
with nacreous shells and crenellations of red coral, is the object. (A mirror?) It's as
if the impossible is true; he knew that was where it was, beneath the sea, that's
why he didn't know what it was, could never find it before. It could be revealed
only by something that had never happened, the greatest paroxysm of our earth
ever measured on the Richter scale.
He takes it up, the object, the mirror, the sand pours off it, the water that was the
only bright glance left to it streams from it, he is taking it back with him, taking
possession at last.
And the great wave comes from behind his bed-head and takes him.
His name well-known in the former regime circles in the capital is not among the
survivors. Along with him among the skeletons of the latest victims, with the
ancient pirates and fishermen, there are those dropped from planes during the
dictatorship so that with the accomplice of the sea they would never be found.
Who recognized them, that day, where they lie?
No carnation or rose floats.
Full fathom five.
Copyright Nadine Gordimer 1999. All rights reserved.